Investigating the effects of robot behavior and attitude towards technology on social human-robot interactions

Many envision a future in which personal service robots share our homes and take part in our daily lives. These robots should possess a certain “social intelligence”, so that people are willing, if not eager, to interact with them. In this endeavor, applied psychologists and roboticists have conducted numerous studies to identify the factors that affect social interactions between humans and robots, both positively and negatively. In order to ascertain the extent to which the social human-robot interaction might be influenced by robot behavior and a person's attitude towards technology, an experiment was conducted using the UG paradigm, in which participants (N=48) interacted with a robot, which displayed either animated or apathetic behavior. The results suggest that although the interaction with a robot displaying animated behavior is overall rated more favorably, people may nevertheless act differently towards such robots, depending on their perceived technological competence and their enthusiasm for technology.